The reports note that Netflix has been in talks with Roku and Comcast to “discuss arrangements under which those companies would handle either the ad sales or the technical infrastructure of Netflix’s forthcoming ad-supported tier of service.” That makes a lot more sense, than Netflix just buying Roku. Both Roku and Comcast have their own streaming services, which do serve ads. Roku has The Roku Channel which is providing free content, but at the expensive of seeing ads. While Comcast has Peacock, which has ads on its free and Premium plans, with Premium Plus being the only ad-free tier. Not to mention it also runs operations for Paramount, Google and works with Disney’s streaming services too. Both have experience with selling ads, and also the infrastructure behind it. Something Netflix has no experience with.
It’s still early days for ad-supported Netflix
Netflix announced earlier this year that it would be launching an ad-supported plan later this year. Which was quite surprising to a lot of people, since Netflix was so set against adding ads into their content. But we’ve seen a number of other platforms do it, like HBO MAX and soon, Disney+. And where Netflix really has no where else to grow, this was their only choice. A Netflix spokesperson has said that it’s still the early days in developing this tier for the company. So there’s no idea yet on how many ads we’ll see, how much the ad-supported tier would cost, or anything like that. What’s interesting here though, is a lot of the content it has licensed, it only optioned the ad-free rights, until it announced it was adding ads just a few months ago. So we may not see ads in the middle of content, rather, at the beginning and end. We’ll find out more as we get closer to this launching in the fourth quarter of 2022.
